Air waybills are essential to any process related to the shipment of goods anywhere in the world. They may serve as a receipt of goods by an airline and may represent a contract between a shipper of goods and the airline responsible for transporting the goods to the desired location. Air waybills may include terms and conditions of carriage such as the air carrier's limits of liability, a description of goods, and applicable charges. Several companies, such as United Parcel Service (UPS) and Fedex, use air waybills in their air cargo transport operations to support millions of shipments to global destinations daily.
Each air waybills may contain a collection of fields that need to be filled out by a user, such as the name of the shipper, the name of the air carrier, the cost of the shipment, and the expected date of receipt of goods. Because air waybills are essential documents that contain several important pieces of information, auditing becomes a critical step that accounting systems have to implement into their process to verify the accuracy of the information entered into the air waybill and make necessary changes as required. In addition to verifying information on an air waybill, auditing is also desired to modify air waybills based on certain rules imposed on an air waybill by a particular entity, such as an airline cargo shipment company. For example, if a company wants to enforce a special charge on a cargo shipment based on the weight of the cargo itself including the palettes that support the cargo, but the air waybill only lists the weight of the cargo itself, after the total cargo weight is measured, a user is tasked with manually auditing the air waybill to accurately reflect the correct special charge allowing the shipment company to prevent losses in revenue.
Manually auditing air waybills is usually a cumbersome task that requires a user to accurately and alertly track every air waybill before the air waybill is ready to be invoiced. Moreover, different users typically have different approaches for auditing air waybills, so multiple parties are involved to check the accuracy and quality of a users' work product on the air waybill. With the amount of air waybills that are generated daily, a user may easily be overworked, and an overworked user is bound to make mistakes in processing the air waybill, Some airline cargo shipment companies have resorted to outsourcing auditing to third party companies for processing, but this action results in increased costs to the airline company, increased delays in finding discrepancies in the air waybill and claiming necessary refunds, and increased disputes with agents at third party companies over mistakes made in the air waybill processing and recuperation of lost funds. Therefore, a method and system for integrating a level of automation to the auditing of air waybills may be beneficial to airline cargo shipment companies by allowing the number of users involved in the process to be significantly reduced.